Tag: Moscow

New Video: Free Love Releases a Mischievous Take on 120 Minutes-era MTV Videos

Since their formation under the name Happy Meals in 2014 at Glasgow, Scotland’s The Green Door Studio, best known for being the birthplace of a number of local DIY bands, including renowned acts Golden Teacher and Total Leatherette, Free Love, comprised of Suzanne Rodden and Lewis Cook quickly established themselves as one of their homeland’s most acclaimed dance pop acts, as their 2015 full-length effort Apero was nominated for Scottish Album of the Year. Adding to a growing profile, the band opened for the likes of Liars and The Flaming Lips, and played sets at festivals in Austin, TX, Moscow, and Bangalore. Despite their recent change in name, the duo further cements their reputation for utopian and somewhat brainy dance pop experiments with their dance floor friendly. shimmering, 80s synth pop and New Wave-inspired single “Synchronicity.” While the track may remind some listeners of Nu Shooz’s “I Can’t Wait,” and New Order’s “Blue Monday” and “Bizarre Love Triangle,” the song is about breaking from the binds of culturally dictated self-limitation, coupled with the vertigo of complete freedom.

Shot by Harrison Reid and Omar Aborida and edited by Gary McQuiggan, the recently released video for “Synchronicity” was filmed at Carlton Studios and features friends of the band as four different “bands” with four different backdrops. But as the band’s Lewis Cook explains to The Quietus, “I wanted it to look like a Sparks video or something like that. I like videos where it’s just a band playing. But because the track is all electronic music, it’s just us with drum machines and synthesizers. So we thought it’d be cool to do this thing you used to see in the 90s where people had clearly made a track on a sampler.” As Suzi Rodden adds, “but they’re kidding on that they’re playing all these instruments in their video. Big bass guitars and full drum kits and maracas and stuff.”
 

Los Angeles, CA-based electro pop artist Adam Finkel, best known as Alek Fin has worked with a number of Los Angeles-based producers and artists including Robot Koch while Moscow, Russia-based producer Sergei Galunenko, best known as Galun initially crafted a career collaborating with a variety of Russian artists as a renowned beatboxer — and interestingly enough Finkel and Galunenko’s collaboration can trace its origin to when the duo were individually included on the same blog’s Top 100 Tracks of 2013. As Galunenko explains in press notes, geographical distance wasn’t an issue, “I found him and I knew I wanted to work with him. I thought we could really add something to each other’s music, despite us leaving 6,000 miles apart. Finkel was equally impressed by the Moscow-based producer’s “manipulation of vocal percussion and inspiring melodies.”

The duo’s previous collaboration together Golden, Blinding was critically applauded and with the recently released Strannik EP, which will further cement the duo’s reputation for crafting a sound that effortlessly blended electro pop/electronica and chillwave; in fact, the duo’s sound has been favorably compared by some of my colleagues to the likes of Bonobo, James Blake, Future Trend and Deco Child. And when you hear Strannik‘s latest single “Ionosphere” you’ll see why as Finkel’s plaintive and ethereal vocals are paired with an atmospheric production consisting of shimmering synths, stuttering drum programming, wobbling low end and ambient electronics in a song that’s eerily spectral while gently nodding at Portishead and others.